Nate Nasralla

Co-Founder

Fluint

Stop losing deals when you're not in the room.

Start selling with committed buying champions to land more enterprise deals.

Our platform is built on the fact B2B deals are won and lost during a buyer's internal meetings — not sales meetings. When champions pitch your product, and teams debate your value, without you.

But most deal champions wing their message, or create their own pitch materials, because they won’t send templated product decks filled with marketing speak to their boss.

To help, Fluint converts your buyer's own words from sales calls into a personalized business case your prospects are proud to champion with you.

Sales Assembly

Featured Thought Leader

Pavilion

Member

RevGenius

GAN is a highly-curated community of independent accelerators, partners, and investors with one collective focus: creating opportunities for startups around the world to access the human and financial capital they need, so each can build powerful businesses and make a meaningful impact, wherever they call home.

Chief Growth Officer

Network for Good

Developed our company’s first-ever enterprise sales division, which grew from $0 to represent 30% of core-product ARR in its first few years.

• Engineered the (successful) launch of the company’s enterprise-level sales operation by developing an end-to-end buyer journey including marketing automation, product offering, pricing strategy, go-to-market strategy, and rep recruitment/retention;

• Created and implemented the company’s first-ever outbound sales strategy to grow core-product ACV, scaling to represent 30% of ARR;

• Personally sold $1.5M while also managing the sales team and cross-functional responsibilities;

• Built, delivered, and managed the sales-effectiveness program for a 25-person sales team, while spearheading a six-month, company-wide integration project to ensure all business areas understand and address the unique needs of a new enterprise customer type.

Managing Director, Enterprise Division

Sr. Sales Director

DonorPath

Co-founded DonorPath, growing the company from its first pilot customers to the successful acquisition by Network for Good, overseeing sales operations, marketing strategy, customer renewal, and the implementation of its company-wide growth dashboard. 

• Directed the acquisition of over 300 B2B customers, moving the company beyond its “pilot” phase;

• Built the segmentation and Marcom strategy to match the right messages to our customers, consultants, and partners, balancing the needs of all;

• Pioneered 2 sales channels new to the nonprofit sector, increasing our growth rate to 70% year-over-year and becoming the first nonprofit software to sell through foundation partners;

• Developed a cross-functional, company-wide dashboard to measure marketing conversion, pipeline efficiency, revenue growth, customer retention, and year-over-year growth.

Charles River Associates

• Directed six separate comparable company analyses used in an economic valuation for the largest bankruptcy proceeding in Canadian history.

• Created the profitability model used to value a patent infringement for one of the world’s largest video game manufacturers.
 
• Authored sections to the opinion reports of the top intellectual property and transfer pricing experts that were relied upon in two notable legal proceedings.

• Developed the ability to quickly distill ambiguous and often large quantities of data into key, actionable insights.

Consultant, Tech & IP Valuation

Tiesta Tea Company

• Initiated relationships with two grocery store chains each with yearly revenue in excess of $3 billion;

• Worked alongside two of the top three largest national grocery distribution companies in addition to structuring customized supplier contracts to fulfill large account needs;

• Developed over twenty account strategies to engage and retain the company’s profitable clients;

• Launched the company’s food safety and recall program to comply with federal regulations.

Director, Business Development

LeaderTreks

- Coordinated funding and logistical details with global non-profit organizations for student trips
- Trained three separate work teams in brick and mortar construction and was responsible for the team’s safety and construction progress of a two story orphanage facility 
- Managed the schedule of a group of fifteen people and facilitated daily performance reviews

Team Leader

I'll teach you to sell with buyers, not to them I Founder @ Fluint.io

Selling with buyers (not to them), by creating deal champions is my jam. You'll read a lot about that if you follow me here 🤟🏼

More long-form writing at fluint.io/blog.

___

The backstory, if you're curious: 

B2B sales has been my whole career, and I love it. 

Sometimes, I’m founding the products I sell. Other times, building teams to sell. 

I used to think sales reps close deals. Over time, I realized they don’t — buyers do.

That’s because the make-or-break moments in a complex deal happen without sales reps in the room. 

Buying decisions are made during internal meetings — when champions pitch their own team, in their own words — yet AE's don't have a great way to help their champions in those moments.

It's why I founded Fluint. To help AE's sell with their buyers, not to them, and stop losing deals when they're not in the room. 

I send out long-form content and templates/frameworks on this approach, Buyer Enablement, 2X per month. Signup for that email here: 

fluint.io/newsletter 💌

Stop losing deals when you're not in the room.

Start selling with committed buying champions to land more enterprise deals.

Our platform is built on the fact B2B deals are won and lost during a buyer's internal meetings — not sales meetings. When champions pitch your product, and teams debate your value, without you.

But most deal champions wing their message, or create their own pitch materials, because they won’t send templates product decks filled with marketing speak to their boss.

To help, Fluint converts your buyer's own words from sales calls into a personalized business case your prospects are proud to champion with you. 

Join our private beta 👉🏼 nate@fluint.io

The typical enterprise POC is just a paid trial, and a losing strategy.

‘Pay a little, show us you’re serious, then you get product access.'

Here’s the formula for winning POCs to use instead:

1/ The least amount of activity,

2/ Over the shortest amount of time,

3/ Focused on a single, big uncertainty,

4/ To lower a perceived barrier to change,

5/ And end with a clear go/no-go condition.

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = More revenue in less time.

Here's a break down.

______

→ 1 & 2: Small & Fast

Reframe the paid trial as structuring a short, contained experiment.

Because short and fast POCs aren’t just better for you (shorter cycle time). They’re an easier initial ask for the customer too.

The next steps are how you keep POCs contained.


→ 3 & 4: Focused & Specific

The typical POC thinks, “When they see how great our product is with their own data, they won’t be able to go back.”

Sales by persuasion. More information, more access, more “wow.”

But an effective POC asks, “Why haven’t they changed already?”

To identify the one, greatest barrier to change and source of risk.

Then focus all the POC's activity on that one uncertainty.

It’s 20% of the trial activity, to dispel 80% of the doubt.

Which also means every POC should look unique.

(While most POCs are the same setup, just different data.)


→ 5: Clear Go/No-Go

This is where you’ll want to use hypotheticals to talk if/then.

“If we’re able to show X, then we’ll want to move forward with Y.”

Don’t leave talking commercial terms and expansion until after.

Layout two scenarios:

- Go: What are the conditions under which expansion terms kick in?

- No-Go: What’s just an “okay” POC, not enough to move forward?

______

You're shifting from:

Paid trial —> structured experiment.

Long and wide —> short and focused.

Wowing with product —> reducing risk.

Delayed expansion talks —> Clear next steps.

It’s been a pretty surreal summer on LinkedIn.

And it’s made my life as a father and founder so rich, so meaningful, and far more life-giving than I was expecting.

As a founder:

100+ paid customers signed up for Fluint after we launched right here (our launch "strategy" was 1 LinkedIn post).

As a father:

This morning, I fed and changed my daughter with a bottle and clothes from the wildly generous friends I met on LinkedIn.

Both parts to life took a long, long time to create. Years and years. So introducing you to what we’ve been building, within 2 weeks of getting introduced to my daughter, was wild.

Each part of life could be exhausting on its own.

But I feel like I’ve been sleeping 10 hours a night (I haven’t) because of all the love and energy from you. Absolutely loving this season of life. 

So a big ol' thank you for all the support you’ve given us and for celebrating with us. From me, my wife, and my co-founder. 

And thanks, LinkedIn Sales Solutions, for the invite to be part of the [In]siders group today. It just caps off a killer summer. Stoked to join you all, and thanks Christopher Forde and Amari Gonzalez!

This group, by the way, is very different from a list of rankings or “influencers.”

The whole point is for this group to figure out how we make LinkedIn better for you. Better content, better features, better friendships.

So if you’ve got ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Can’t wait for what’s to come 🤟

You should be borderline obsessive about key account prep.

Which includes prepping your own team (who’s underprepared).

Try building out a pre-meeting brief for them that:

1/ Designs the convo from start-to-finish.
2/ Quickly gives your own execs context.
3/ Shows your team who does what, when.

You can use this framework I built out over the years.

Grab an editable version here:

https://lnkd.in/g23bGKVk

_____

Short story on it: I was briefing our CEO before meeting a big ol' insurance company a few years back and he goes:

“What do we want them to feel afterward?”

I was like, what do you mean feel?

“Feelings. It's the one part of the meeting guaranteed to stick.”

And it’s so true. So objectives / key questions reference this now.

Can we all just celebrate Cobi for a minute?

Here's what her CEO & VP Sales just said about her. 

For context, they've been working together for 20+ years: 

“Cobi, you’re doing the best work of your life right now.”

So good. A couple things she points out you can apply are:


1/ The biggest unlock in Cobi’s career = messaging.

The words we use to “help buyers get where they wanna go” are key.

Less technical language. More internal language.


2/ Confidence is the emotion you want to create.

Instead of looping in leadership in one deal, her champion made the call:

“Our case was so solid, we skipped entire steps in the buying process.”


3/ Business cases aren’t just for prospects.

They’re for customers, too. It’s how Cobi creates context post-sale.

Multithreading doesn't stop after the deal first closes.


Cobi, you’re a good one. Thanks for letting us celebrate with you!

The # 1 focus I’m hearing from VP's of Sales right now:

Increasing “revenue per rep.”

Topline goals are generally increasing faster than plans to add headcount.

So instead of saying, “Well, if we want to double revenue, we’ll double headcount,” the question is, “How do we add more from existing reps?”

It's a measure of sales efficiency. Here’s a quick example.

Let’s say the last 12 months ended with:

10 AE’s
(x) avg revenue/rep at $750K
(=) $7.5M new revenue

Now let's say the goal for next year is $12M. This looks like:

12 AE’s
(x) avg revenue/rep at $1M
(=) $12M new revenue

Which saves the cost, ramp, and risk of 4 other hires. (Plus, the 10 existing reps are excited by their progress.)

So here's the question:

What’s the right way to take revenue/rep from $750K → $1M?

There are lots of answers to that one. But I strongly believe the *highest leverage* is a process for creating business cases in every deal.

Which drives up win rates, by helping your champions sell internally.

That's because internal buying conversations are where deals are actually won or lost. And where 90%+ of the buying activity happens.

Plus, it's a "cornerstone" activity that ends up enabling so many others, like deeper discovery, multithreading, etc.

So, if you’re: 

(1) focused on increasing revenue/rep, and 
(2) every deal *doesn’t already have a business case in place* 

I’d start by exploring this first. 

What would happen if 80% of deals in your pipeline had a legit biz case?

Holler if I can help ✌️

→ www.fluint.io

Pretty sure I just gave the demo of my life.

15 mins after it ended, I had email intro's to 2 new contacts + 1 exec.

Here's the secret, and exactly how I prepped for the call:

I honestly didn't do any of the prep I was hoping to. My wife needed to run and asked me to hold our newborn (she's ~12 weeks old now) right before. 

She sat in my lap, and we did this thing where we stare at each other until we both burst out laughing. Over and over, it's delightful.

Did that for about 15 minutes, wife came back, started the call, and pretty sure I was still smiling the whole time.

So I guess the point here is this: just roll with it and smile. 

You'll do great.

(But also do some call prep when you can.)

One of my favorite discovery questions is rarely used.

Even though buyers love talking about the answer.

Try asking:

"What's something about this problem that others you’ve shared it with don't always seem to understand?"

____

You're creating space for someone who’s misunderstood to share why.

It develops that, "Finally! Someone who gets me," feeling.

Which means your words carry more weight after.

If you can understand in a way others don’t...

...you'll develop deals in a way others can't.


Pretty stoked on some of the updates coming to Sales Navigator.

They're particularly interesting for strategic reps doing targeted outreach + research, to craft a point of view for their accounts.

(Exactly what I was posting about earlier today, on writing "strategic soundbites" for top accounts.)

You can tell SalesNav: 

"Find me a shortlist of VP's of Digital Innovation based in London, who previously worked at a company inside my Current Customers list, with more than 5,000 employees globally."

Then click into one of those leads, and pull up a list of company priorities aggregated from outside sources. 

Combine that research with a good framework, and you're off to the races.

It's rolling out on a limited pilot, and it'll continue to get better over time, no doubt. But the #deepsales features coming are pretty well-aligned to the "job to be done" IMO.

What do you think? 

Pitching ROI in sales is dead.

According to Gong data, presenting ROI and low close rates go hand in hand.

Two things happen when most salespeople sell ROI:

- they do it so naively that it backfires
- it's a Hail Mary attempt to save a deal

When a senior exec hear's a salesperson say "the ROI of our product is..." they write-off that salesperson.

They think you’re making too big of a leap between what your product does and the expected financial return you’re waving in front of them.

The best salespeople create bullet-proof business cases instead.

(Read: ROI is only one element of this!)

Here's how they do it, according to one of the top business case experts in the world:


1. State the Situation

Define the current state. 

What are they trying to accomplish?

What's standing in their way?

Make it relevant to the exec's priorities.

Make it urgent with conflicting obstacles standing in the way of their goal.


2. Define the Problem Statement

This is what most sellers get wrong:

They think buyers buy because of ROI.

Nope.

They buy to solve problems first.

And the financial ramifications of those problems are far more compelling than the ROI of your product.

In other words, the 'cost of inaction':

- what is the problem costing them?
- what the opportunity costs?
- what are the indirect costs?
- what are the direct costs?

Capture the problem as well (or better) than your customer can.


3. Create a Bridge

Read: This is not about your product.

Read (again): This is not about ROI.

The Bridge explains the root cause of the problem.

Which then allows you to explain what the customer NEEDS to solve the problem.


4. Define Three Scenarios.

This is where you start to hint at ROI.

Show three possible scenarios.

- no action
- best case
- base case

Executives think in ranges and possibilities.

Yet most sellers give a definitive number:

"You'll get exactly 22% ROI on our product, just like our other customers!"

That's a sure-fire way to lose your credibility.

Build three possible scenarios instead.


5. Define the Required Resources.

Explain what the customer will need to do to make this projection successful.

- dedicating headcount
- dedicating time
- spend
- etc.

Most salespeople shy away from this.

They want to make it seem (unrealistically) easy to deploy their product.

Execs know better.

Call out what you need for this to be a success, and you'll earn instant credibility. 

Plus, you reduce their fear of shelf-ware. 

Because they know what it takes to avoid that now.

That's all for now.

If you want to see a real-life example of this (plus steal the bullet proof business case template), grab it here: https://lnkd.in/dycxuMnG

P.S.

Tag a salesperson in the comments that would find the template useful.


This is me right before the World Triathlon Championships.

Somehow, my roommate and I qualified to race for Team USA.

(We snuck into the last two slots for our age group, back in 2015.)

I took 5 weeks of PTO to race in Spain, Sweden and the US that year. Not including typical holidays and hunting season. 

No coincidence, I did some of my most creative work ever that year.

Longgg rides and runs were where I uncovered dozens of creative and original ideas, that I never would have found in the office. 

Those ideas took me way further than 5 extra weeks of work could have.

Which is why I like the way one of my fav writers, David Ogilvy, puts it. I’ll weave together quotes from different parts of 2 books here:

________

“The majority of [sellers] are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked.
Big ideas come from the unconscious.

This is true in art, in science and in [sales]. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.

You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you.

I have developed techniques for keeping open the telephone line to my unconscious, in case that disorderly repository has anything to tell me. 

I hear a great deal of music… I take long hot baths. I garden. I go into retreat among the Amish. I watch birds. I go for long walks in the country.

And I take frequent vacations, so that my brain can lie fallow — no golf, no cocktail parties, no tennis, no bridge, no concentration; only a bicycle.

While thus employed in doing nothing, I receive a constant stream of telegrams from my unconscious, and these become the raw material for my work.”

_______

Telegrams from your unconscious.

It’s why you probably see a lot of top performers on your team taking their fair share of PTO. To receive and read more telegrams. 

And yes, I know. You might be thinking...

“Well yeah, they can take a vacation! Because they hit their numbers!”

But could it be that they hit their number, because of their time away?

Regardless of what your sales leadership does or doesn’t say to encourage time away, I say do it anyway.

Big ideas and original thinking often happen when you’re away.

More hours and days can get you to a "local" maxima, but not the "global" maxima (math analogies, anyone?)

PS… Ogilvy had 19 clients when he took a long vacation to write “Confessions of an Advertising Man.”

It sold 1 million copies, and two decades later, he had 3000 clients.

I’m really glad he took that vacation.

I bet you will be too. Where you going next?

5 things top reps know, that average reps don’t.

Whenever I hear these 5 quotes in a deal review, it's a signal.

There's work to do, to move that rep from average → standout.

______


1/ Building committed champions for every deal in your pipeline.

→ Average Rep: “They love our product!”

→ Top Reps Know:

The right champions with the social capital to sway internal convo’s will test you. By default, they work around you, not with you.

To be clear, I don’t mean standout reps test their champion. It’s the other way around. You need to prove they’re better off running their process with you, than without you.


2/ Framing high-cost, high-priority problems in thoughtful discovery.

→ Average Rep: “They shared the perfect pains. We solve them all.”

→ Top Reps Know:

You can find a genuine problem with real costs and still lose deals.

When a problem isn’t framed to align with an internal priority, and used to prime the buying team’s internal convo’s, you’ll be ignored.


3/ Crafting a narrative-style business case to shape internal convo’s.

→ Average Rep: “I organized all our demo recordings, decks, etc… inside a beautiful page for them.”

→ Top Reps Know:

Your writing can be in the room when you can’t be. Spend what seems like an unreasonable amount of time co-creating a written message, to guide your champions’ convo's and shape thinking.

80% of this content won't be directly about your product.


4/ Design the flow of buying team communications to build influence.

→ Average Rep: “I’m tracking buying roles, titles, and reporting structure in this account map.”

→ Top Reps Know:

The corporate hierarchy isn’t how deals get done. The “shadow org chart” is far more influential.

Be painfully detailed about designing the flow of communications. Script who says what, to who, and when.


5/ Stoke buying team conflict & overcome dysfunctional groups.

→ Average Rep: “I got 10+ contacts involved, I’m multithreading!”

→ Top Reps Know:

Large buying teams are full of drama, communication overhead, and blockers who can say “no.”

So shrinking deals to the “minimally viable buying team,” and stacking it with the right, high-influence contacts keeps your deals from dying out.


What's number 6 on your list?

What are your champions saying when you're not in the room?

There's one way to know: script out their message with them.

PS, Trent hosts a great podcast. Highly recommend it.

The most-important, overlooked metric in your CRM: 

→ The ratio of Seller:Buyer activities. 

Too many sales leaders will look at a long list of activities inside an opportunity and think, “Wow, they’re all over this one. Nice job!” 

And totally overlook how lopsided the activity is. 

Those 10 emails and calls to a Stage 3+ deal… 

…got a single email reply with a few words in it. 

That’s it. Which is a 10:1 ratio. Pretty scary.

Compared to a 2:1, or even 1:1 activity ratio for deal in the same stage? 

I’m putting my money (and reputation) on the more even, 2:1 ratio. 

A couple other signals to look for inside the activity history: 


1/ Spacing between activities. 

Are replies & follow-up’s happening same day? 

Same week? Even longer to get something back? 

Tighter spacing between activities = stronger. 


2/ Who’s initiating the activity. 

Is it always the seller? Is the buyer starting new threads? 

Proactive outreach from the buying team = better. 


3/ High vs. low-value activities. 

Two deals could have the same activity ratio. 

But one may have more "below the line" activities.

Above the line activity = stronger.


4/ Activities not in the CRM. 

A lot of high-value activity shows up in texts / Whatsapp. 

So if it's a late-stage deal, do we have texts from champions too?

If not, I start to press into the details more.

Selling is hard. Like, really hard.

Especially when you're a founder, and it's a fraction of your job.

And if you don't come from a sales background, it's often what you put off until 9pm... after distracting yourself with the 10 other things on your to-do list.

That's why we quietly launched a new program last week:

Fluint for Founders.

Built to help startup founders, without a sales background.

Why's this a thing?

Well, building a company's already an uphill and emotional battle. 

But if you have a system + community around you, it comes (a little) easier.

So the program's built by a builder (that's me), for other time-strapped builders. 

Here's how it works, with both strategy + software to help you execute:

(1) Access to Fluint: generates every piece content you'll need to sell with, from first call through close. Business cases, follow-up emails, etc. 

(2) Self-paced "crash course" on selling complex deals. 25 lessons on how to navigate stuff like multithreading. (Listen while you do dishes or go for a jog.)

(3) Daily group coaching + meetups with other founders. These happen 12pm - 1pm, every weekday.

Plus some extra founder-specific training on stuff like:

(1) competing against more mature products
(2) winning creatively without brand recognition
(3) embracing buyers seeing you as the "riskier" option

Instead of $100/mo for software, $300 for a course, investing in coaching for $300/hour, it's all $50/month. And includes this promise: 

Close a deal in the program, or your $50/month is repaid to you.

It's not a ton. But your cash is precious. So let's generate more, together.

→ Check out more at www.fluint.io for how the platform works.

→ Then go here if you'd like to be part of it: www.fluint.io/pricing 

* Click ‘Get Started' and use the code 'Founder' *


(And if you're not a founder, but know one who might like a lil' help, would you share with them?)

"All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there." 

That's from the legendary Berkshire Hathaway investor, Charlie Munger.

His point was that it's way easier to avoid losing, than it is to win. So:

(1) List all the ways you'd for sure lose that big deal.
(2) "Invert" the list, and do the opposite.

EOQ coming up for a lot of us. Stay safe out there.

Thanks for having me on with the enterprise crew, Sales Assembly 🙏

Fell behind on editing a business case with one of my champions this week.

So I dusted off this email, which I think is way underrated.

It’s an alternative to two, equally-bad choices:

1/ Sending an uninspiring template on-time.
2/ Sending a killer follow-up that's way late.

_______

Subject: On the way

Hey Ally, I mentioned following up on our conversation by tonight.

Turns out, my timing was a little ambitious (I was just excited about our conversation).

I'd like to invest a little more time to build out a more thoughtful recap.

This way, it'll land better with your team, and we can share it on Friday.

Would that timing work okay for you?

______

Sometimes, you need a little extra time to be thoughtful.

If that’s you this week, just communicate it. It always lands well 🤟

This discovery question has been my fav recently.

It makes for richer conversation, and less plain vanilla answers:

“Being able to < label your main product benefit here > is obviously helpful. But beyond the obvious, what would a successful project like this enable you to do, that you can’t today?”

When you take the most common answers off the table by labeling them upfront, you get past the surfacey answers.

Which is the difference between selling to people, vs. general “personas.“

So if you’re in a deal review and your answers to, “Why are they interested?” sound like your marketing material, give it a try.

I should also clarify something though.

Vanilla — as long as it’s vanilla bean and not french vanilla — is good stuff 🍦

Stoked to share Fluint's now part of the Gong Collective ✌️

Beyond an ‘integration,’ here’s why that’s an exciting thing:


1/ A shared focus on “unlocking reality.”

I like how Gong talks about the ‘Reality’ platform. Less opinion, more customer data behind every revenue decision.

A big reality revenue teams are up against is the fact sales reps aren’t in the room when buying decisions are made.

So, to not only understand but *shape* reality, you have to find a way to be in the room where it happens — even if you can’t literally be there.

Which is where influencing internal buying conversations, by co-creating your champions' business case content, comes into play.


2/ Quality Conversations = Quality Content

I can score the quality of a rep’s discovery in a sales conversation, by reading the business case Fluint drafts for the champion's internal conversation. 

If they found a "critical event," business impact, etc... 
 
Which makes sense, right? Shallow conversation, shallow content.

It’s also the # 1 thing AE's realize when they try writing business cases.

“Woah, my discovery is 10X more crisp now.”

This link between writing and discovery isn't very obvious at first. But here's why it's so strong. Writing immediately clarifies:

(1) what you already knew, but didn’t realize
(2) what you don’t yet know, but need to

So the more you lean into coaching sellers with Gong...
...the better your content in Fluint.

The more you lean into writing with Fluint...
...the better your sales conversations logged in Gong.

With both working together...
...you'll shape reality, and unlock revenue.

💬 + 📄 = 📈

“Good writing is expensive, but poor writing costs a fortune.

Poor writing transfers the work from the writer to the reader. Good writing, on the other hand, nearly reads itself, allowing the reader to spend more time thinking about the ideas than pulling out meaning.

Poor writing might be one of the single biggest invisible costs in organizations.”

That’s from Shane at Farnam Street, and his take is on point right here.

Clarifying your message in writing makes it easier for champions to sell you internally.

You’ll spend more time and effort to do it. No doubt.

But poor writing (or not writing, and relying on template decks instead) will cost you far more.

So if you’re still not writing out new content with each champion, try this.

It’ll make the cost of poor writing more “visible.”

1/ Start with a benchmark for target win rate.
2/ Subtract your actual win rate from that benchmark.
3/ Multiply the difference by qualified pipeline.

That’s how expensive bad writing is. For example:

1/ Start with a 33% target (though you can do more).
2/ Winning by Design’s latest research shows 17%.
3/ Let’s say qualified pipeline is $1M/rep this quarter.

So, (33% - 17%) x ($1M) = $160K/rep this quarter.

If you’re a leader with 10 sellers, that’s $1.6M.

50 sellers? $8M. Every quarter.

We’re working on reducing that cost for teams.

Here's how, in a little Loom video I made of me writing out an exec summary + follow-up email, with some help from Fluint:

Open video: Writing a Follow-Up + Exec Summary on loom.com

https://www.loom.com/share/cd444f8543ec4840923dd735b887a852?sid=bbb692cd-9e57-4da6-a6ca-e69a350c0b29

The strongest buying signal I'm seeing: time-between-meetings.

So I’ve been asking this at the end of my calls lately. HubSpot says my discovery → follow-up meeting rate went up 120%. 

(Yeah, I for sure had room to grow.) 

“Is this important and interesting enough to meet again on [next step]? 

No worries if not.” 

Nothing crazy. But I’ve been re-learning how to sell faster/SMB-style deals. 

And in the words of Julia Carter: 

“Welp Becky I hate to break it to you, if they aren't booking a next step......... they probs aren't interested ¯\(ツ)/¯” 

So if we *don’t* set a new time then, I’ll de-prioritize the convo too. 

Because one of two things are true: 

(1) building business cases isn’t a high-priority item. 
(2) it is a priority, but our approach isn’t interesting. 

______

Two examples: 


(1) Opens a chance for more discovery. e.g. a VP said last week: 

”It’s high on my list, but I don’t think our reps can make the shift to do it.” 

I didn’t agree, but I knew where we stand. 

Maybe one day we cross that bridge. For now, I’m focused on others. 


(2) On the flipside, if they say “yep, let’s set a new time,” I’ll ask: 

”Is this a ‘this week’ kinda thing? Or more a ‘in a few weeks’ kinda thing?” 

Another VP answered: 

”I’m traveling but I have an hour gap in the airport tomorrow, let’s talk then.” 

So we met < 24 hours later during a layover. 

Which was a very “high-intent” signal. 

The amount of time that passes between meetings says A LOT.


Got any other tips for a guy selling SMB after doing enterprise for years? 

Adjusting to the pace and volume has been tough sledding, ngl.

Taplio

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